E. M. Lewis

E.M. Lewis is an award-winning playwright, teacher and opera librettist. Her work has been produced around the world and is published by Samuel French/Concord Theatricals.

Lewis received the Steinberg Award for both How the Light Gets In and Song of Extinction, and the Primus Prize for Heads from the American Theater Critics Association, the Ted Schmitt Award from the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle for outstanding writing of a world premiere play, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a playwriting fellowship from the New Jersey State Arts Commission, the 2016 Oregon Literary Fellowship in Drama, and an Edgerton Award for her epic Antarctic play, Magellanica.

Plays by Lewis include: How the Light Gets In (Steinberg Award winning play that premiered at Boston Court Pasadena in 2019), Apple Season (which received a rolling world premiere from the National New Play Network in 2019), The Gun Show (which has had more than 40 productions across the country and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland), Song of Extinction, Heads, Infinite Black Suitcase, Reading to Vegetables, True Story, Dorothy’s Dictionary and You Can See All the Stars (a play for college students commissioned by the Kennedy Center).

Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Fallen Giant, a new opera commissioned by American Lyric Theater that Lewis wrote with composer Evan Meier, had its academic premiere in 2023 at Portland State University and its professional world premiere at Opera Modesto in 2024. Town Hall, her opera about health care in America, created with composer Theo Popov, was produced at University of Maryland and Willamette University.

Lewis is currently working on a variety of projects, including a big new play called The Great Divide, commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as part of their American Revolutions program, co-commissioned by Artists Repertory Theater. Lewis received a six-year National Playwright Residency from the Mellon Foundation to support her work.

Lewis is a proud member of LineStorm Playwrights and the Dramatists Guild. She lives on her family’s farm in Oregon.